Quotes from William McDonough

We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.

Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

Ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure...it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an "acceptable" rate.

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

Schumacher posited that people must make a serious shift in what they consider to be wealth and progress: "Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

How do we love all children, of all species, of all time?

product of service. Instead

one small decision has the power to make a real difference for the economy

valuable technical nutrients—cars, televisions, carpeting, computers, and refrigerators, for

We can only describe actual performance goals that are realistic

Dow Chemical has experimented with this concept in Europe, and DuPont is taking up this idea vigorously.

Design is the first signal of human intention. When we look at plastics in our environment, if it's our intention to do these things then we must question our intentions. If it's not our intention, then what's our plan? The question becomes how we can behave in a way that works.

But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an "acceptable" rate.

How do we love all children, of all species, FOR all time?" ? William McDonough

We humans have the ability to see beyond our species, and that ability confers a responsibility.

Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?